Cartolabe: A Web-Based Scalable Visualization of Large Document Collections

Philippe Caillou, Jonas Renault, Jean-Daniel Fekete, Anne-Catherine Letournel, Michèle Sebag

Abstract: We describe <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Cartolabe</small> , a web-based multiscale system for visualizing and exploring large textual corpora based on topics, introducing a novel mechanism for the progressive visualization of filtering queries. Initially designed to represent and navigate through scientific publications in different disciplines, <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Cartolabe</small> has evolved to become a generic framework and accommodate various corpora, ranging from <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Wikipedia</i> (4.5M entries) to the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">French National Debate</i> (4.3M entries). <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Cartolabe</small> is made of two modules: The first relies on natural language processing methods, converting a corpus and its entities (documents, authors, and concepts) into high-dimensional vectors, computing their projection on the two-dimensional plane, and extracting meaningful labels for regions of the plane. The second module is a web-based visualization, displaying tiles computed from the multidimensional projection of the corpus using the <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Umap</small> projection method. This visualization module aims at enabling users with no expertise in visualization and data analysis to get an overview of their corpus, and to interact with it: exploring, querying, filtering, panning, and zooming on regions of semantic interest. Three use cases are discussed to illustrate <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Cartolabe</small> ’s versatility and ability to bring large-scale textual corpus visualization and exploration to a wide audience.